India has a populist government stirring nationalistic sentiment, much like what had happened in the USA. The intersection of those similar, yet disparate national trajectories, underlies this debut novel. This is a story of class, gender and generational conflict in a country where the populace strives for advancement. However, that goal is unattainable for much of the population.
Maneka has returned to India from America after 12 years away to comfort her father after her mother’s death. The family live in a fictional city, Hrishipur, in northern India. Maneka’s American connection is a neat segue into the conversation about India’s place in the world. She has seen Trump’s rise to power and his name now appears in Hrishipur: Trump Towers is a newly planned residential estate for the wealthy. Maneka’s father, Samiran, lost money investing in a local developer’s speculation. The differences between these two developments exposes an existential national dichotomy. India presents as an independently successful postcolonial country and their populist government prioritises Hindu culture. Simultaneously, American money and Western culture flood the country. With the monetised creep of Americanisation, the government’s parochial nationalism appears to be hypocritical.
Ten characters, from the lowly to the wealthy, rotate control of the narrative, allowing the reader to better understand how people can – or cannot – achieve their life’s dreams.
In this story, those who have the most to lose, lose the most, serving as a metaphor for India itself. Pollution hides stars from the night sky, but the light on Trump Towers is brightly visible – a beacon of hope, or an alarm?
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oindrila Mukherjee grew up in India, where she worked as a journalist for the country’s oldest English language newspaper The Statesman. She has attended university on three continents and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University. Her work has appeared in Salon, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Oxford Anthology of Bengali Literature, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She was the creative writing fellow in fiction at Emory University from 2009 to 2011.
She has been the recipient of a Nehru Chevening Centenary Scholarship from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Diana P Hobby Prize from Inprint Houston, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conference and a fellowship from the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts. She is a a contributing editor for Aster(ix), a literary and arts magazine committed to social justice. She created a book series called Bottom Shelf for the Indian magazine Scroll.in, where she writes about lesser known or forgotten Indian books in English.
The Dream Builders was published in 2023.
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